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Castile
and Aragon

Resistance
to the Muslim invasion in the eighth century had been
limited to small groups of Visigoth warriors who took refuge
in the mountains of Asturias in the old Suevian kingdom, the
least romanized and least Christianized region in Spain.
According to tradition, Pelayo (718-37), a king of Oviedo,
first rallied the natives to defend themselves, then urged
them to take the offensive, beginning the 700-year
Reconquest (Spanish, Reconquista), which became the dominant
theme in medieval Spanish history. What began as a matter of
survival in Asturias became a crusade to rid Spain of the
Muslims and an imperial mission to reconstruct a united
monarchy in Spain.

Pelayo's
successors, known as the kings of Leon, extended Christian
control southward from Asturias, tore away bits of
territory, depopulated and fortified them against the
Muslims, and then resettled these areas as the frontier was
pushed forward. The kingdom's political center moved in the
direction of the military frontier.

In the
tenth century, strongholds were built as a buffer for the
kingdom of Leon along the upper Rio Ebro, in the area that
became known as Castile, the "land of castles." The region
was populated by men--border warriors and free peasants--who
were willing to defend it, and were granted fueros
(special privileges and immunities) by the kings of Leon
that made them virtually autonomous. Castile developed a
distinct society with its own dialect, values, and customs
shaped by the hard conditions of the frontier. Castile also
produced a caste of hereditary warriors whom the frontier
"democratized"; all warriors were equals, and all men were
warriors.

In 981
Castile became an independent county, and in 1004 it was
raised to the dignity of a kingdom. Castile and Leon were
reunited periodically through royal marriages, but their
kings had no better plan than to divide their lands again
among their heirs. The two kingdoms were, however,
permanently joined as a single state in 1230 by Ferdinand
III of Castile (d. 1252).

Under the
tutelage of the neighboring Franks, a barrier of pocket
states formed along the range of the Pyrenees and on the
coast of Catalonia to hold the frontier of France against
Islamic Spain. Out of this region, called the Spanish March,
emerged the kingdom of Aragon and the counties of Catalonia,
all of which expanded, as did Leon-Castile, at the expense
of the Muslims. (Andorra is the last independent survivor of
the March states.)

The most
significant of the counties in Catalonia was that held by
the counts of Barcelona. They were descendants of Wilfrid
the Hairy (874-98), who at the end of the ninth century
declared his fief free of the French crown, monopolized lay
and ecclesiastical offices on both sides of the Pyrenees,
and divided them--according to Frankish custom--among
members of the family. By 1100 Barcelona had dominion over
all of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands (Spanish, Islas
Baleares). Aragon and the Catalan counties were federated in
1137 through the marriage of Ramon Berenguer IV, count of
Barcelona, and Petronilla, heiress to the Aragonese throne.
Berenguer assumed the title of king of Aragon, but he
continued to rule as count in Catalonia. Berenguer and his
successors thus ruled over two realms, each with its own
government, legal code, currency, and political
orientation.

Valencia,
seized from its Muslim amir, became federated with Aragon
and Catalonia in 1238. With the union of the three crowns,
Aragon (the term most commonly used to describe the
federation) rivaled Venice and Genoa for control of
Mediterranean trade. Aragonese commercial interests extended
to the Black Sea, and the ports of Barcelona and Valencia
prospered from traffic in textiles, drugs, spices, and
slaves.

Weakened
by their disunity, the eleventh-century taifas fell
piecemeal to the Castilians, who had reason to anticipate
the completion of the Reconquest. When Toledo was lost in
1085, the alarmed amirs appealed for aid to the Almoravids,
a militant Berber party of strict Muslims, who in a few
years had won control of the Maghreb (northwest Africa). The
Almoravids incorporated all of Al Andalus, except Zaragoza,
into their North African empire. They attempted to stimulate
a religious revival based on their own evangelical brand of
Islam. In Spain, however, their movement soon lost its
missionary fervor. The Almoravid state fell apart by the
mid-twelfth century under pressure from another religious
group, the Almohads, who extended their control from Morocco
to Spain and made Seville their capital. The Almohads shared
the crusading instincts of the Almoravids and posed an even
greater military threat to the Christian states, but their
expansion was stopped decisively in the epic battle of Las
Navas de Tolosa (1212), a watershed in the history of the
Reconquest. Muslim strength ebbed thereafter. Ferdinand III
took Seville in 1248, reducing Al Andalus to the amirate of
Granada, which had bought its safety by betraying the
Almohads' Spanish capital. Granada remained a Muslim state,
but as a dependency of Castile.

Aragon
fulfilled its territorial aims in the thirteenth century
when it annexed Valencia. The Catalans, however, looked for
further expansion abroad, and their economic views prevailed
over those of the parochial Aragonese nobility, who were not
enthusiastic about foreign entanglements. Peter III, king of
Aragon from 1276 until 1285, had been elected to the throne
of Sicily when the French Angevins (House of Anjou) were
expelled from the island kingdom during an uprising in 1282.
Sicily, and later Naples, became part of the federation of
Spanish crowns, and Aragon became embroiled in Italian
politics, which continued to affect Spain into the
eighteenth century.

Castile,
which had traditionally turned away from intervention in
European affairs, developed a merchant marine in the
Atlantic that successfully challenged the Hanseatic League
(a peaceful league of merchants of various free German
cities) for dominance in the coastal trade with France,
England, and the Netherlands. The economic climate necessary
for sustained economic development was notably lacking,
however, in Castile. The reasons for this situation appear
to have been rooted both in the structure of the economy and
in the attitude of the Castilians. Restrictive corporations
closely regulated all aspects of the economy--production,
trade, and even transport. The most powerful of these
corporations, the mesta, controlled the production
of wool, Castile's chief export. Perhaps a greater obstacle
for economic development was that commercial activity
enjoyed little social esteem. Noblemen saw business as
beneath their station and derived their incomes and prestige
from landownership. Successful bourgeois entrepreneurs, who
aspired to the petty nobility, invested in land rather than
in other sectors of the economy because of the social status
attached to owning land. This attitude deprived the economy
of needed investments and engendered stagnation rather than
growth.

Feudalism,
which bound nobles to the king-counts both economically and
socially, as tenants to landlords, had been introduced into
Aragon and Catalonia from France. It produced a more clearly
stratified social structure than that found in Castile, and
consequently it generated greater tension among classes.
Castilian society was less competitive, more cohesive, and
more egalitarian. Castile attempted to compensate through
political means, however, for the binding feudal
arrangements between crown and nobility that it lacked. The
guiding theory behind the Castilian monarchy was that
political centralism could be won at the expense of local
fueros, but the kings of Castile never succeeded in
creating a unitary state. Aragon- Catalonia accepted and
developed--not without conflict--the federal principle, and
it made no concerted attempt to establish a political union
of the Spanish and Italian principalities outside of their
personal union under the Aragonese crown. The principal
regions of Spain were divided not only by conflicting local
loyalties, but also by their political, economic, and social
orientations. Catalonia particularly stood apart from the
rest of the country.

Both
Castile and Aragon suffered from political instability in
the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The House of
Trastamara acquired the Castilian throne in 1369 and created
a new aristocracy to which it granted significant authority.
Court favorites, or validos (sing., valido), often
dominated their Castilian kings, and, because the kings were
weak, nobles competed for control of the government.
Important government offices, formerly held by members of
the professional class of civil servants who had urban, and
frequently Jewish, backgrounds, came into the possession of
aristocratic families who eventually held them by hereditary
right. The social disruption and the decay of institutions
common to much of Europe in the late Middle Ages also
affected Aragon, where another branch of the Trastamaras
succeeded to the throne in 1416. For long periods, the
overextended Aragonese kings resided in Naples, leaving
their Spanish realms with weak, vulnerable governments.
Economic dislocation, caused by recurring plagues and by the
commercial decline of Catalonia, was the occasion for
repeated revolts by regional nobility, town corporations,
peasants, and, in Barcelona, by the urban
proletariat.

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